1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network communications and interactive multimedia.
2. Background Art
Speakers often invite questions from an audience. Some presentations have a question and answer period after a presentation. Other speakers take questions during the event. It is often the case that a question arises during a presentation that will be answered by a later segment of the presentation. However, the speaker often stops and restarts the talk to answer the question. In addition, some questions might benefit the majority of the participants while other questions may only have the effect of needlessly sidetracking a speaker. Because the speaker and participants may be sensitive to these issues, some good questions may never get asked or answered.
Some presentation formats presently exist to allow questions to be submitted in text by participants in a presentation or event. Such formats are provided for distance learning, online presentations and teleconferences. However, the questions of other participants are usually never seen by all of the participants. The questions that do get answered are usually picked in some ad hoc fashion by a moderator. Audience members may not have a chance to decide or influence which questions they want to have answered.
Participants often like to respond to and influence discussion topics. Chat rooms and blogs provide some avenues of expression related to presented topics, but these are often time-insensitive, distributed efforts that are not moderated. Such asynchronous formats are not intended for focused live talks or presentations with attentive participants.
In a non-presentation context, topics may be influenced through user-based ranking systems. Users and community participants can presently select media articles and then take action to promote media articles to the top of a popularity list. Comments on these articles can be collected and likewise promoted up or down. However, these article ranking systems do not center around an ongoing or future live talk or presentation. In addition, discussion items are not provided and voted on in real-time by invited collaborators. These ranking systems are often ineffective due to less than serious participation and too much user control. Other online collaborative systems suffer from a lack of simplicity and flexibility. Such systems are poor formats for efficient and effective interaction between a live presenter and serious audience participants.
In addition, many events include an agenda or list of topics to cover during the event. However, this agenda is often based upon a less than fully informed assessment of what topics are most important to attendants. Often this wastes time, money and patience. It is true that certain events are better served by direction from a single individual or group of individuals. However, some events and meetings welcome serious (or less than serious) input from participants and are better served by such participation. Also, an increasing number of events involve numerous individuals spread out among different locations. Frequently, a determination of which agenda topics are most important to participants is usually made during or after the meeting. Further, such input is often not representative of the participant group as a whole and is often not channeled simply and effectively.